Snaps & Chats

Just like talking to someone in person or on the phone, having a conversation through Snaps and Chats lets you express whatever’s on your mind at the time – without automatically keeping a permanent record of everything you’ve ever said.

Of course, you can also choose to save a Snap before you send it and recipients can always take a screenshot. You can also save a message in Chat. Just tap it. Snapchat makes it easy to save what’s important, without being bogged down by the rest.

My Story

Snaps and Chats are like snippets of a personal conversation, while Stories are more like, well, a story you’re telling to a larger group of friends.

You can share Snaps in your Story with just your friends, or with the entire Snapchat community. Sometimes, if a My Story is set to viewable by “Everyone” and becomes popular, it may be featured in Discover and other places so more people can see it! Snaps in your Story are posted for 24 hours, though you can remove them from your Story at any time.

Our Story

Snaps you submit to Our Story can show up in Discover, Search, on the Snap Map or even on third-party platforms – like on the big screen at the match! Keep in mind: Snaps submitted to Our Story are public and can be viewed and shared by people across the world! Also, Our Story submissions may be stored and viewed for longer periods of time – sometimes for months or more. If you’d like to remove a Snap you’ve submitted to Our Story, you can do so through Snapchat settings.

Memories

Memories makes it easy to look back on Snaps you’ve saved, and even edit and resend them!

Memories was developed with privacy and security in mind. Early on, we recognised that just because you want to be able to look back on something, doesn’t mean that you want everyone else to be able to, too!

After all, diaries and photo albums exist for a reason – they’re something private you keep to look back on a memory or share them with someone special. That’s why only you can view your own Memories!

Keeping Memories backed up online helps keep them from being lost, but that shouldn’t mean you have to sacrifice your privacy or security. That’s why we made “My Eyes Only”, which lets you keep your Snaps safe and encrypted, and protected behind a password you choose. That way, even if someone steals your device and logs into Snapchat somehow, those private Snaps are still safe.

Without the password, no one can view the things you’ve saved to My Eyes Only – not even us! Be careful, though, because if you forget your password, there’s no way to recover those encrypted Snaps.

Lenses

Ever wonder how Lenses swap your face with a friend’s or give you puppy dog ears?

Some of the magic behind Lenses is due to “object recognition” – an algorithm designed to help a computer generally understand what objects are in an image. In this case, it lets us know that a nose is a nose or an eye is an eye.

But object recognition isn’t the same as facial recognition. While Lenses can tell what is or isn’t a face, they don’t recognise specific faces!

Advertising

We are committed to creating products that make Snapchat better for everyone, which is why our ad products are built from scratch, tailored just for Snapchat. These include things such as film trailers in Discover, as well as Sponsored Filters and Lenses.

Every single person is different, and no one is going to like every ad they see. If an ad isn’t relevant to you or you don’t think it belongs on Snapchat, you can always let us know by tapping ⋮ , then tapping ⓘ to report the ad to us!

We want to show you ads that are relevant to you and your interests – but we don’t want to serve ads that are so custom-tailored that they’re invasive or uncomfortable. It’s a difficult balance and we may not always get it right, so we’re always counting on Snapchatters for their feedback. Share your experience with us, if you have a moment!

Spectacles

Spectacles are sunglasses that capture your world, the way you see it. Just press the button to save the moment, in the moment – without having a phone get in the way. We specifically made Spectacles sunglasses because they’re meant to be used when you’re out in the world – whether you’re on an adventure or just going about your day.

Whenever you take a photo or video with Spectacles, a ring of LEDs will light up to let your friends know that you’re recording. Each video can only record up to 30 seconds, so they’re not made for continuous recording.

Our Community Guidelines have always asked Snapchatters to be thoughtful and respect people’s privacy – and that same philosophy applies to Spectacles, down to their design!

Your Snapchat account

You can view and edit most of your key account information and privacy settings right inside of Snapchat. But if you’re curious about something that’s not in our apps, you can visit accounts.snapchat.com, click “My Data”, and then click “Submit Request”. We’ll gather your account information and let you know when it’s ready for you to download. If you ever want to leave Snapchat for good, you can close your account on accounts.snapchat.com too.

Account security

It’s hard to have a sense of privacy if you don’t feel safe and secure too. That’s why we provide you with features like login verification (a form of two-factor authentication) to secure your account, and why we take considerable efforts to secure our own infrastructure. But there are also a few extra steps you can take to keep your Snapchat account especially secure:

Pick a strong and unique password: it may be easier to use the same password for all your apps, but to make sure your account’s secure, try flexing your creative muscles to come up with a long, unique one – and no, “Password123” isn’t going to fool anyone. If you have trouble remembering passwords, consider using a password manager to generate secure passwords that you don’t have to memorise! Whatever your method, remember: never share your password with anyone, just to be safe.

Turn on login verification: this is an important feature that uses two-factor authentication to add an extra layer of security, if your password is ever compromised.

Don’t use third-party apps: third-party applications and plugins (or tweaks) are not supported by Snapchat, and can sometimes compromise the security of your account. We strongly suggest that you don’t install any, just to be safe!

Search

Search lets you find Stories on just about any topic! Search takes Snaps that are submitted to Our Story and automatically groups them together based on common themes or a shared location.

A huge number of Snaps are submitted to Our Story every day, but not all of them will make it into search results or be seen by a wide audience. The length of time Snaps stay in Search can vary – some may only be around for a few hours, while others could stay up for longer. The process is almost entirely automated, so if you see something that’s miscategorised or violates our Community Guidelines, please reach out to us and report it! Every report helps Search get better at showing you the things you’re looking for.

Snap Map

Snap Map lets you see where your friends are, what’s going on around them, and even see what’s happening across the world! To open the Snap Map, just pinch your fingers on the Camera, Friends or Discover screens.

You won’t appear on Snap Map until you open it for the first time and choose to share your location!

If you don’t open the app for 8 hours, you won’t be visible on the Map until you open Snapchat again. You can always update the people you’re sharing your location with in Snap Map settings, or go into “Ghost Mode” to hide your location from everyone. We may also remind you if you leave location sharing enabled for a while.

Snaps that have been submitted to Our Story can also show up on the Map – but not every Snap will appear there. Most of the Snaps on the Map are selected through an automated process.

When it looks like something interesting is happening, a Story thumbnail might appear on the Map! For the most part, these are also created automatically – while Stories labelled as “Featured” receive a more hands-on approach. Snaps posted to Snap Map are also viewable on the web at map.snapchat.com and are embeddable on other websites.

Please be mindful of the Snaps that you submit to Our Story. Although the Map only shows the general area where a Snap was taken, things like landmarks and street signs appearing in a Snap can show where you are, if you’re worried about that kind of thing.

Location

Snapchat uses your device’s GPS to offer certain location-based features. For example, we use your device’s location to provide Geofilters based on where you’re at or what’s going on around you, or we can use your location to position the Map to show you what’s nearby. We also use your location to figure out what you’d like to see – so people in France see content from French publishers, French ads, and so on.

We store GPS locations for a while to help improve the Map and other features. For example, we may store some of the locations you visit the most so we can show you more relevant Search content or update your Bitmoji’s activity on the Map. We may also store location information of the Snaps you save in Memories or submit to Our Story.

You can still use Snapchat if you disable location permissions in your device’s settings, but many of these features won’t work right (or at all!) without it. Sometimes we can still infer an approximate location like a country or city, based on an IP address – but it’s not perfect.

Personalisation

No two people are the same, so the app can tailor your Snapchat experience especially for you!

For example, the friends you Snap with the most are usually easiest to find, and we generally try to show you ads that’ll be relevant to you. We’re able to do this by making some guesses about the things you like and don’t like.

For example, if you’re constantly watching Snaps of puppies on Discover, you might be a “Pet & Animal Lover”. Or if you regularly post Snaps of your sports memorabilia to My Story, our system might be able to guess that you’re a “Sports Fan”. We call guesses like these “Lifestyle Categories”, and we use them to try and show you ads and content that’s relevant to your interests! If you’d like, you can always pick your own Lifestyle Categories.

We also try to personalise the content you see by using what we call “Content Interest Tags”. These tags are guesses about the content that you may be interested in based on activity, like things you search for, Stories you view, popular users you subscribe to and types of locations you visit. So if you watch a lot of Stories about football, we may create “sports” and “football” Content Interest Tags, so we can show you more Snaps about football. You can reset Content Interest Tags at any time in Snapchat settings!